Not only did intelligence agencies NOT fail to predict virtually all the items on this list, most were common knowledge by the time they happened.
Re: Iran. The entire point of Carter's human rights policy was to force governments to loosen their control. Arguably, the greater disaster before the revolution was the American backing of a brutal dictator, not the failure to see his downfall.
Soviet Union: In 1980-81, I created an argument for the college debate circuit (obviously using open source literature) about the forthcoming collapse of the Soviet state. This is the most far-fetched of all, I realize, and even I didn't really believe it when I was making the arguments. Still...the truth was out there, as they say.
Late that season, my colleague and I put together an affirmative case about the coming disintegration of Yugoslavia and likelihood of civil war. The book The Third World War used this scenario, so this was not exactly obscure.
Pakistani proliferation was widely discussed in the late 1970s (a 1979 BBC documentary was entitled, "The Islamic Bomb") and through the 1980s. North Korea joined the worrisome list around then too -- both years before the actual policy crunch.
9/11: The Bush White House received the famous 8/8/01 PDB warning of OBL's determination to strike inside the US.
Other attacks: Many of us predicted that attacks in Western Europe would follow 9/11 and the Iraq war.
It is unreasonable to demand precise targets and dates. Sure, it is great when intell sources gather than kind of data, but they are far more likely to be accurate when discussing big picture issues.
In virtually all these cases, advance information created concerns that drove real policy debates, which is a genuinely valuable role for intelligence agencies to play. They don't have crystal balls, but they should be able to string together enough evidence to figure out broad trends.
they said this about Iraq. "the intelligence has been proven ineffective" so THEREFORE we can go do something that makes absolutely no sense.
What I find stggering is how short on intelligence the National Intelligence Estimate is! Either the DNI has resorted to only open source intelligence gathering, or our "clandestine" intelligence gathering and analysis capability offers nothing not already in the public domain. Not only is there not a single "surprise" in the released conclusions, but it also shows a very shallow premise upon which to build policy initiatives.
"One could argue, however, that this kind of contingency planning remains almost totally absent from Bush's Iraq policy; in other words, I'm not sure how this would cut in favor of the Bush administration"
An occasional commenter at my site, retired from the IC, indicated that the use of scenario planning is rare at the CIA analytical directorate when I raised that same issue a while back.
On the Soviet Union, one must recall that although the intelligence agencies did not accurate predict its collapse, the same folks who are now complaining that the intelligence community isn't sufficiently hawkish were at the time complaining that the intelligence community was under estimating Soviet power, i.e., that the intelligence community was insufficiently hawkish.
the berlin wall falling down couldn't have been predicted i don't think. it arose out of some sort of misinformation regarding travel to through the wall. it turned into the wall coming down just by virtue of the intertia of the people.
Actually, the point of my post was not to defend the Bush administration.
Rather, I found the entire histronics over what the NIE did or did not say (and both pro- and anti-administration types were trying to use the NIE to bolster their own positions this week) to be rather overblown in terms of the definitive nature of the document.
To hear some talk of either the leaked portions or the portions declassified by the adminstration, one would think that something from the Desk of God had been issued.
And, as I noted, the head of one of our key intel agencies did the whole "slam dunk" routine in regards to WMD in Iraq.
As such, I find the whole discussion to be over the top.
The fuss, Steven, is that the NIE confirms what the rest of us know and the administration refuses to admit.
is there anything that could possibly happen that would enable common sense to be injected into our current foreign policy?
Commenting by HaloScan.com
